Airlines in Europe push young pilots to the edge in a desperate struggle
to live with huge debts as they fly without any job security. It’s
enough to drive some mad, like the Germanwings flier who murdered 149
passengers.

But
the report gave brief attention to work pressures that probably
contributed to his increasingly desperate state of mind—pressures that
are felt by thousands of pilots as a result of how a number of airlines
now treat them as a cost to be ruthlessly controlled and exploited
rather than an indispensable asset central to the safety of flying.

It
is now clear that, in addition to Lubitz’s medical problems, nobody
detected or caught the part played by what the French investigators
called the “socio-economic” pressures on his deeply troubled state of
mind.

The
investigators point out in their conclusions: “One of the explanations
lays in the financial consequences he would have faced in the case of
loss of license. His limited Loss of License insurance could not cover
his loss of income resulting from unfitness to fly.”

And
the European Cockpit Association, representing 38,000 European pilots,
applauded the French report for recognizing the link between “employees’
socio-economic risks” and aviation safety and said that it needed to be
“more in the focus of the aviation industry and European institutions.”

Indeed,
in Europe nearly half of the pilots between the ages of 20 and 30 are
flying without the security of being directly employed by an airline.
Thousands of young pilots like Lubtiz often face a long chain of debt
and financial stress.

Lufthansa,
the parent company of Germanwings, charges students it selects for
training a fee of 60,000 euros out of a total cost for training of
150,000 euros—Lubitz had taken out a loan of 41,000 euros to pay for his
training.

But the costs of satisfying the ambition to become a pilot can be a lot higher than those faced by Lubitz.

The
Irish budget carrier Ryanair, for example, unlike Lufthansa, pays
nothing toward the costs of qualifying as a pilot, which can be as high
as 130,000 euros before even getting into a Ryanair cockpit. All this
occurs at an age when mortgages and new families frequently add to the
obligations. Lubitz reportedly planned to marry his girlfriend.

At
the core of this widely practiced regime are “bogus” employment
contracts—a term used to describe how young pilots are hired through an
agency, not the airline, as though they are self-employed contractors,
thereby stripping them of normal professional employment security and
benefits.

This
practice (for various reasons not possible for airline pilots in the
U.S.) is part of profound changes that are putting new stresses on
pilots in Europe, including one that was cited in the French report on
Lubitz: the high costs to students of learning to fly and the debts that
they incur, often lasting for years.

“There
are plenty of people ready to lend you the money to become a pilot,
certainly in Europe, even though the job market is quite precarious in
your first few years of flying,” Capt. Martin Chalk, the president of
the International Federation of Airline Pilots’ Associations, IFALPA,
told The Daily Beast. “I am aware of more than one airline where their
recruiting and training programs are profitable to the airline. They
don’t care if the pilot fails because they have made their profit from
them anyway.”

The
full extent of the stressful conditions facing pilots became clear only
after work by researchers at Ghent University in Holland. In 2014, at
the request of the European Commission, they set out to survey airline employment practices
across Europe. More than 6,600 pilots, out of a total of around 65,000
in Europe, responded to the researchers, an unusually high response rate
for a survey.

Much of
what the pilots said was alarming and the researchers quickly realized
that they were looking at an unsuspected level of concern among pilots
about not just the experiences of their workplace but the implications
of these experiences for airline safety.

“Originally,
the surveying was not done to unearth safety-related issues,” a veteran
pilot told The Daily Beast. “It was done to identify employment-related
issues. But the safety implications became an emergent outcome that
wasn’t expected. But it wasn’t necessary to do that study to find that
causal link. It was self-evident to people like me.”

The
Ghent University researchers realized that what was happening as a
result of the competition among pilots for jobs was similar to what had
happened in the international shipping industry, where lax labor laws
had been exploited to drive down costs and strip crews of job
security—what the researchers called “a race to the bottom.” This
should, they said, “raise an intense sense of urgency with regard to
flight safety…we call upon all stakeholders to act on this clear
warning. In the civil aviation industry it’s minutes past midnight.”

One of many pilots quoted by the researchers repeated that warning.

“The
race to the bottom needs to be regulated by the European Union before
passengers get killed. People are committing suicide because of this
outrageous way they are being treated.”

Another
said, “This industry is a disgrace. European employment law and working
regulations do not seem to apply to the aviation industry, and those
that are certainly not enforced.”

In
answer to questions from The Daily Beast, the International Air
Transport Association, IATA, said, “Issues concerning employment
contracts are the prerogative of individual airlines. We are confident
in the present system of pilot training and safety, however we believe
that further standardization of activities and the creation of a
performance oversight environment may help to drive further
improvements.”

The
IATA spokesman said he was not familiar with the Ghent University
report and did not respond to the specific question of whether IATA had
studied it. IATA’s principal role is lobbying governments and regulators
on behalf of the airlines, not advocacy on behalf of either airline
employees or the public.

IFALPA,
on the other hand, represents more than 100,000 pilots employed in
nearly 100 countries. Capt. Chalk, whose day job is as a senior captain
on a major international airline based in Europe, says, “Stresses have
been created that weren’t there before. We need to ensure that a highly
competitive marketplace doesn’t have collateral damage. We shouldn’t be
allowing airlines to erode safety margins, working pilots beyond
sensible fatigue or stress limits.

“Even
when people are taken on it will be on a piecemeal basis where, from
month to month, they get whatever work their employer gives them. They
often have high loan costs to pay, and all that bundles up into a very
low standard of living for a period that may appear to be unending. It
is a question with Andreas Lubitz, he was 27 years old and had only been
flying for Germanwings for 18 months. He doesn’t appear to have had any
other form of career.”

Capt. Chalk wanted to make it clear to me that he wasn’t including all airlines or even all budget airlines in his warnings.

“Some
airlines are better than others, and the answer is not to pick on
budget airlines but, rather, to ensure that regulators are insisting on
minimal levels of safety that are prescribed at a global level.”

However,
in the responses to the Dutch researchers, among the European budget
carriers one stood out as the most egregious. They wrote: “The
conditions at Ryanair are observed to be an area of concern… the
position of pilots is becoming increasingly more precarious.”

Ryanair,
based in Ireland, dwarfs all other European airlines. From January to
November last year it carried 99.9 million passengers, and is planning
to carry as many as 180 million by 2024. (In 2015 the total number of
passengers carried by all U.S. airlines was 798 million.) In the six
months ending Sept. 30, 2015, it had record earnings of 1.09 billion
euros and expects its year-end profits to be up by at least 35 percent
on the previous year.

Although
Ryanair originally followed the business model pioneered by Southwest
Airlines in the U.S., using only one type of airplane, the Boeing 737,
and turning flights around much faster on each stop to get the most
efficient use of equipment, the company’s notoriously hard-charging
boss, Michael O’Leary, has since developed his own business model that
screws down far harder on his airline’s costs; Ryanair’s unit labor cost
is 6 euros per seat-mile, compared with Southwest’s equivalent of 35
euros.

Capt.
Chalk’s problem with the Ryanair model is that it “moves risks from the
employer to the employee.” And as a consequence, he says: “If you take
away employment security from safety-sensitive staff you cause them to
be much more careful about raising issues that they feel the employer
doesn’t want to hear.”

One
clear effect of this tension is that because pilots responding to the
Ghent University survey were assured anonymity the number of Ryanair
pilots who seized the opportunity to speak out was unusually high, 650
out of a total of around 3,000. (In contrast, out of 3,662 British
Airways pilots only 73 responded.)

Of
the total number of Ryanair pilots (the actual number can fluctuate
between 3,000 and around 3,400) around 1,400 are captains and 1,700 are
first officers. Between 85 and 90 percent of the captains are on
permanent employee contracts, whereas as many as 80 to 90 percent of the
first officers are on the self-employed contracts—the so-called bogus
or agency contracts—where the pilot is acting, in effect, as a one-man
company hiring out his services.

As
the veteran pilot (who requested anonymity) points out, that’s a
situation in which the majority of captains have job security and most
of the first officers do not.

“Anybody who thinks there is no difference in the way those two groups respond to safety issues is living in Alice in Wonderland.”

Experienced
captains get the better deal, he says, because “they are a core group
and are much more difficult to replace.” On the other hand, “a first
officer on an agency contract doesn’t get paid if he doesn’t fly.”

The
airline’s pilots have frequently complained about how the company
assigns home bases to its crews—these are the cities throughout Europe
where crews are based according to the routes they fly. Generally senior
captains can choose the cities closest to where they live, but first
officers have complained of arbitrary assignments at short notice.

For
example, last month the Ryanair Pilot Group that represents more than
half of the airline’s pilots, complained that pilots at two German
bases, Frankfurt-Hahn and Bremen, had been told that because fewer
flights were being operated from these cities in the summer they would
have to move to other cities. The pilots, said the Group, had been given
just eight days to respond with their preferences without any
indication that they would be met.

Ryanair pilots replying to the Ghent University survey also cited lack of sick leave as a source of undue pressure.

As
one Ryanair pilot told The Daily Beast: “The typical pattern is that a
pilot who has had more than five sick days in a year will get a
notification on a Thursday or Friday to go to a meeting either in
Stansted [near London] or Dublin the following Monday or Tuesday. In
that time they have no possibility of getting professional advice over
the weekend, and they won’t be told any specific details of what the
meeting will focus on. It will be pointed out to them that it’s not
really acceptable to be sick for more than five or six days in a year.”

Every
six months all Ryanair pilots, captains and first officers, are
required to have what is called recurrent training, where they are
checked for their flying proficiency in a flight simulator. For every
hour a Ryanair pilot flies passengers, 4.2 euros are deducted from his
pay to cover the costs of this training.

However,
despite what many pilots see as an unusually relentless pressure
applied to the human costs of operating at Ryanair the airline has a
virtually flawless record—not one fatal accident in 30 years of rapid
expansion.

As
Capt. Chalk noted: “Ryanair, along with all the other low-cost
airlines, are very vocal that they do not compromise on safety. In large
part, that is true. They often have young fleets of airplanes. I have
no evidence that they cut corners with engineering, or that they don’t
fulfill all the training criteria.”

It
is also important to acknowledge that regimes like those at Ryanair and
other low-cost carriers are, of course, part of the bargain that has
been struck between us, the passengers, and an airline industry that has
delivered a level of value and convenience that only a few decades ago
would have seemed unattainable, and in doing so they ended a system of
cartels that had kept fares beyond the reach of many.

This
year nearly half the world’s population, 3.5 billion people, will be
flying on scheduled air routes throughout the globe. And the safety
record has never been better: In 2015 there were only three fatal
accidents worldwide. That included the Germanwings mass murder-suicide
and the Russian Metrojet crash in the Sinai that has been attributed to
terrorism.

Those numbers translate into one death for every 40 million passengers.

How
has this been achieved? Two things have happened simultaneously and
coincided in their effects: radical new business models that make flying
accessible to many more millions of people, and a technological leap in
the safety-critical elements of commercial aviation. So staggering is
this advance that if the ratio of fatal accidents to the number of
flights remained where it was in 1962 we would be seeing a serious air
crash every other day instead of barely any in a whole year.

In
this transformation the pilots haven’t got smarter, the airplanes have,
as well as all the navigation aids that support them. One by one the
original main causes of crashes have been virtually eliminated: engine
failure, metal fatigue and structural failure, weather, human error.
(Last week’s crash of a FlyDubai Boeing 737 in Russia seems to have
demonstrated that weather, if it combines with a chain of other factors,
can still be lethal if due caution is not exercised by pilots and air
traffic controllers. Fly Dubai has a budget-airline business model and
the BBC is reporting that the pilot involved in the crash was about to
quit because of fatigue problems—and that another pilot had fallen
asleep at the controls from exhaustion.)

In
an analysis made by Boeing, the three threads that characterize airline
disasters—the overall accident rate, the fatal accident rate, and the
total loss of an airplane—have all fallen steadily over the decades to a
point where they very nearly merge at zero.

But
pilots will always remain at the core of safety, the last resort in an
emergency. And the demand for them will increase. Boeing has predicted
that by 2034 as many as 558,000 pilots will be needed worldwide.

At
the moment in Europe, though, there is a surplus of qualified pilots.
(There is a shortage of pilots in the Middle East and China, and in
North America the pool of pilots will soon be inadequate to meet growing
demand.)

Cockpit
automation has meant that the new generation of pilots has never had
the “seat of the pants” instincts wired into them that older generations
brought to the job. Nonetheless recent experiences (notably the crash
of AirAsia Flight 8501 in December 2014) have shown that, more than
ever, pilots need to keep sharp reflexes and well-trained responses for
those moments when a human needs to intervene if the technology fails.

For that reason it would be dangerously complacent to see safety solely in terms of what shows up in accident statistics.

In
the culture of budget airlines, for example, there could be, Capt.
Chalk warns, “a growing risk that the management hasn’t yet become aware
of, and may not be aware of until it manifests.”

And
the veteran pilot adds: “If the criterion is simply, ‘Did we kill
people?’ then safety isn’t a problem. But safety is not an absolute,
it’s a spectrum of possibilities. The real question is not how many
events you have had, but how many times did you come close?”

Of
course, given all the pressures and personal hardships described here
that are faced by aspiring airline pilots in Europe, the question is:
Why do young people, as they clearly do, continue to enlist for pilot
training? One pilot quoted in the Ghent University report said, “The
flight schools are selling a dream to 18-year-old kids.”

And Captain Chalk agrees: “There is still an allure to flying, people will bend over backwards to get into the job.”

But
then he cautions: “In this profession it’s not until your mid-thirties
that you are getting to a point where most people would anticipate being
in their mid-twenties. Income stability available to most professionals
in their mid-twenties, certainly by the end of their twenties, is
pushed back here a number of years beyond. It’s something that the
Germanwings report didn’t address.

“When
I began my career somebody paid for my training and I signed a
commitment to work for them for a period of time, and so long as I
worked for that period of time the training cost was absorbed by the
company. They sank a significant investment in me and they wanted to see
a return.

“But
the path I took to get my job is no longer available. It doesn’t exist
any more. It is a very difficult prospect now. I’m not sure I would
encourage my children to take up flying.”

John said,DUTCH GOVERNMENT OWNED BANK ABN AMRO EXPLOITING YOUNG DUTCH PILOTS WHICH BRINGS THE BANK MULTI £MILLIONS IN PROFIT EACH YEAR.Read below.http://ryanairdontcarecrew.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/dutch-government-owned-bank-exploiting.html

As for Ryanair,
bogus Pilot and Cabin Crew employment contracts are what keep Ryanair going.Profit being priority over safety.Employment law and legislation in Ireland is a joke which favors Ryanair.
Ryanair chief David Bonderman a US Billionaire is the mastermind behind Ryanair's success with Pilots and Cabin Crew generation multi £millions through a per hour rate of pay Scam which this blog has covered many times over the years.
We must also remember Liverpool based Pilot Mr Paul Ridgard who committed suicide in 2011 with Ryanair management heavily involved.Read below.http://ryanairdontcarecrew.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/paul-ridgard-rip-ryanair-first.htmlandhttp://ryanairbrookfielddontcare.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/paul-ridgardrip-ryanair-pilotirish.html

Flowers at Liverpool's John Lennon Airport.Paul Ridgard We Must Never Forget

22 Mar 2016

The three maydays in 2012 through low fuel at Ryanair clearly showed profit is priority at Ryanair.
Not only do Ryanair stoop so low as to push the on board charity scratch card scam as a way in helping poor sick children with cancer and giving under 1% of sales to charity,clearly profit is priority.
We know have Ryanairtrying to profit from the Brussels attacks.Ryanair today denied a Merseyside politician's claims it was “trying to make profit” from the Brussels attacks.See the report below.http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/brussels-attacks-ryanair-strongly-denies-11078062#ICID=FB-Liv-main ''Profit at Ryanair is priority'' with Ryanair's management working very hard in charging people a premium price to get home from Belgium.Do not take Ryanairdontcare's word for it look at the comments from twitter

Let us not forget the three Ryanair maydays in 2012 which was blamed on Ryanair saving money on fuel and the death of a Ryanair pilot Paul Ridgard in 2011.
Clearly showing Ryanair's priority is profit.

John said,The public and politicians seem to be shocked that Ryanair don't care about people.Priority at Ryanair has always been profit at any cost.That is why Ryanairdontcare Campaign have been exposing many scams inside Ryanair with the Termination of thousands of new recruited cabin crew bringing in the most profit through the per hour rate of pay scam.

What this Blog is all about... http://ryanairdontcarecrew.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/why-it-all-started

Why Ryanairdontcare Campaign was set up in 2008.
http://airobserver.wordpress.com/2012/04/26/inside-ryanair-dont-cares-campaign-an-interview-with-john-foley/
http://airobserver.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/inside-ryanair-dont-cares-campaign-an-interview-with-john-foley-part-2/